Phantom Needs
by Sky Samuelle
Summary: Blair’s contemplations as she exercises the fine art of denial between ep 1.10 and 1.11 Blair’s contemplations as she exercises the fine art of denial between ep 1.10 and 1.11 : Blair Waldorf doesn’t need Chuck Bass.


Phantom Needs

**Phantom Needs **

**Author: **Sky Samuelle

**Summary: **Blair's contemplations as she exercises the fine art of denial between ep 1.10 and 1.11

Blair Waldorf doesn't need Chuck Bass.

He's a habit, this strange new taste she has so recently acquired to be bared and touched… to feel warm, experienced palms sliding along her back, a wet mouth exploring the vulnerable curve of her neck, the hitch of a man's breathing against the hollow of her throat. To hear dirty, but almost tenderly spoken, words whispered in her ear.

God, his voice—husky and aching, yet so dark and velvety soft than it risked mimicking affection—saying all those things to her as he caressed every secret place of hers. Obscenities like, "Come on, sweetie. Show me you want me too," or, "You are so tight and slick, Blair. I swear I might live in you forever," they made her feel like she was about to melt underneath his weight, like she couldn't breathe anymore but wouldn't need breathing, never again.

She's sort of ashamed now, of how much she enjoyed all of that, of how confident and beautiful his attentions made her feel. How she allowed herself to almost forget that Chuck Bass didn't take anything seriously, much less sex. Especially not sex. She isn't that special for him, regardless of how deceptively intimate it could feel having him inside her, all over her.

She won't regret breaking their tentative tryst at the first sign of trouble, won't miss that extra rush of adrenaline. This is all that it was anyway. Nothing else than a short, meaningless pause from her

preordained, perfectly functional routine.

She hasn't rushed back into the Nate's kisses—more overtly enthusiastic than she remembers them ever being—to escape _his_.

She hasn't laid back and spread her legs for her first love to close an imaginary door on a future she has barely been able to glimpse. She hasn't kept her eyes wide open to remember it was Nate moving over her, just to squeeze her eyelids shut when the adoring voice of the blonde boy had sighed her name against her collarbone and a very different, vaguely accusing face has flashed before her.

Chuck is the bottom she would never sink to unless forced, the excess she wouldn't have dared to graze until her masterfully architected future splintered into countless sharp-edged pieces around her, and the only option left was abandoning herself to the high tide, trusting it carried her safely back to shore.

She hadn't any expectations, so how could Chuck Bass betray any hopes?

She _knows_ they've always been better off as allies, how senseless was this new thing between them.

How senseless is now the restlessness growing inside her as his silence stretches hours and days too long.

Their friendship, volatile though it's always been, has soured too easily. Silly, really, that a few weeks' affair has the power to shift balances established over a decade.

She won't reach for Chuck as anything more than a friend (he's always been there, you know? In the background or on the forefront of her life, the times when it mattered and the ones when it didn't) so she won't question why something dark coils in her gut and clenches hard when it becomes clear he won't chase after her, won't come to berate her in her face for taking back Nate.

It's so unlike Chuck to give up.

If his sudden quietness concerns her, she convinces herself it is because she isn't sure about what he might do, not about what he might _feel_ (although, after all that has transpired lately, he must feel something, right?)

When she goes to him, there's nothing fluttering in her stomach, because she isn't dreading that he might turn her mind to forgiving him for ruining her cotillion (he _can_ occasionally prove himself even more persuasive than her).

And when his father spouts to her that he's in Monaco, sounding all blasé and sadly unsurprised, like there's nothing unnatural in replacing a Waldorf so fast, no sickness is spreading in her veins. She isn't struggling to string a polite response together, or excusing herself a bit too quickly.

Blair gets out the Palace and her shivers are caused by the cold winter air which carelessly hits her face, not by the angry bitterness roaring in her chest.

Because she isn't clenching her teeth and picturing another woman straddling him already, grasping his short hair between her fingers while he kisses his way from her flat tummy to her inner thighs.

"Monaco, huh? Anything I need to know?"

She digits on her cell and sends the SMS fast, before she can think it through. This can all be a game, but the only rule she knows is the very same she has set for herself from the beginning: she can't depend on him.


End file.
